Haskell Weekly News: November 1, 2005

Greetings, and thanks for reading the 13th issue of HWN, a
weekly newsletter for the Haskell community.
Each
Tuesday, new editions will be posted (as text) to
the
Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to
The Haskell
Sequence.

New Releases

Time Library 0.2. Ashley Yakeley announced
a draft of a new time library and solicited comments.

Calls for participation

HCAR entries due TODAY. Andres Loeh posted a
reminder
that entries for the Haskell Communities and Activities Report are
due today.

Discussion

Undecidable instances. In a thread
about the need for undecidable instances, Johannes Waldmann suggested
the use of termination analyzers.

Finding the character frequency in a string.
Jon Fairbairn started an interesting thread
about calculating the frequency each character in a string
occurs.

Haskell Toolchain

GHC assembly. John Meacham posted
an analysis of GHC's assembly output, a comparison to jhc, and
some suggestions for improving GHC's output.

Data.* collections maintenance. This large
thread
on the libraries list covered potential future directions
for the Data.* libraries.

Quotes of the Week

For those that adhere to learn one new language per year which
other languages should we learn?
Matz suggests io (or Haskell but he admits it makes his brain explode).
-- From RubyConf 2005 Roundtable discussion with
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator of Ruby.

The Meta-FAQ

Q: What happened to HWN last week?

A: The answer to this question really goes back to the 16th
century and the first movements in Europe to modernize astronomy
away from the earth-centric view. But it wasn't really until
Newton's time (late 17th and early 18th centuries) that we
started to have the more advanced understanding necessary to
begin answering this question. Modern astronomers have been
able to calculate the period of the earth at 86164.09053
seconds, which is a few minutes shorter than the apparent day
due to the earth's simultaneous orbit around the sun.

The second part of the answer to this question dates back even
farther to ancient Egypt. The Egyptians used a duo-decimal
numbering system, and found it convenient to separate each day
into 24 equal units. Since then, other definitions for the
hour have come in to play, usually based on the apparent solar
day or the time between sunrise and sunset. These days, the
hour is defined at 3600 seconds.

While each day appears to consist of approximately 24 hours,
the period of the earth really is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and
4.09053 seconds. (I for one am pleased to receive the extra 4
minutes per day.)

So, we can see that the problem really is that there just weren't
enough hours in a day for your HWN editor to get the issue out
on time last week. I blame it on the ancient Egyptians.

Q: Would HWN have come out on time if you hadn't had to prepare a
lengthy explanation for why it was late?

A: Good question. You should medidate on that for awhile and
let us know for next week's HWN.

Q: Does this issue cover two weeks of fascinating Haskell
news then?

A: Of course!

About Haskell Weekly News

Thanks to Jim Apple and Josef Svenningsson for contributing to this week's HWN.

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